


The crazy kids

by LiveOakWithMoss



Series: Punching out my dancelines [18]
Category: The Silmarillion and other histories of Middle-Earth - J. R. R. Tolkien
Genre: Alcohol, Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Bad French, DWMP verse, Eurotripping, Gen, Hunting, Tyelko and Irisse are bad tourists, Tyelko mighta killed a man but he ain't telling, or possibly very good ones
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-09-02
Updated: 2015-09-02
Packaged: 2018-04-18 15:29:43
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,463
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4711046
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/LiveOakWithMoss/pseuds/LiveOakWithMoss
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Celegorm and Aredhel backpack across Europe. They don't make it very far, though.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The crazy kids

**Author's Note:**

> 0\. My third and final giveaway prize, for sansastarkly! She made a glorious request for dwmp!Celegorm and Aredhel having travel shenanigans and I had way too much fun with it. Also you can probably tell by this what (very limited) parts of Europe I've spent time in.  
> 1\. This takes place just before DWMP starts, that first summer, right after Celegorm and Aredhel graduate. Neither of them have SOs at this point.

Celegorm and Aredhel graduated from college, to the amazement of all, on the 17th of May. (There were some minor incidents involving champagne, and nudity, and the Dean, but on the whole, they _did_ graduate. Technically.)

 

By the 20th they were on their way around Europe with overlarge backpacks, a tent that had belonged to Fingolfin and Anairë in the ‘80s, and a guidebook that was ten years out of date. They threw it into a canal on their fifth day out, and never looked back.

 

(Back home in the States, Fingon said to Maedhros that he was less amazed that the two had managed to graduate than he was that their parents had, in all sobriety, decided to let them leave the country together.

Maedhros had sighed and said that he was just surprised they’d been let across the border, but maybe, if they were lucky, they wouldn’t be allowed back.)

 

The second week of their trip found them in France where, in Provence, they went to a nude beach and promptly got sunstroke.

Back in their hostel that night, Celegorm had stuck his head in a sink full of tepid water to try and bring down his internal temperature and declared that it had been worth it. He pulled his head out of the sink and shook himself, sending water flying and drenching the hapless Swede trying to make it to his bunk. Aredhel handed the Swede her towel, and nudged a pillow under Celegorm’s head as he stretched out on the floor and passed out.

The next day, as Celegorm tried to find clothes that wouldn’t hurt too much to wear over the worst sunburn of his life, Aredhel had wandered down the street to a bookstore and gone through two French cookbooks trying to track down the French word for ‘lobster’ so she could tease him properly.

“ _Homard!_ ” she announced happily, when Celegorm came downstairs with his hat pulled low over his eyes as he squinted into the bright light. “My rosy crustacean friend.”

“Gawd,” he said. “I wish Mae was here. No one can burn like him.”

In the club they snuck into that night, unable to afford the cover, Aredhel confused a great number of interested French boys by declaring loudly that she couldn’t dance with them as she had lost her _homard_. “He was here a moment ago. Have you seen him? Bright red, offensive, wearing a muscle shirt… No, dude, _il a disparu_. _MON HOMARD. IL EST PERDU –_ Oh wait, there he is, on that table. Wanna do some bodyshots off him?”

Soon after getting thrown out of the club, and then the hostel, they’d jumped on a bus to the Alps.

 

On the tenth day, they woke up early and ran around Lake Annecy.

Celegorm’s leg was twingeing him a bit by mile five, but the way Aredhel was cursing at the bicyclists and drivers who whipped too quickly past them down the narrow, curving roads, made him laugh too much to notice it. At the top of one hill he had to stop and cry with laughter for a while as Aredhel chucked rocks after a leering motorist in an Aston Martin.

“Oh yeah? OH YEAH? You _better_ run, you bitchass putain!”

 

On the eleventh day, they ran out of money.

“How did this happen?” asked Aredhel helplessly, rummaging through the receipts in her fanny pack.

Celegorm scratched his head, trying to think back on their purchase history. “Okay, so we bought that weed in Amsterdam…”

“Your fault.”

“You wanted it too!”

“But the fact that it was actually oregano? Your fault.”

“Maybe. But how about the night you kept ordering the top shelf scotch in that bar?”

“I didn’t mean to, my Italian is just really bad!”

“We were in _Dublin_.”

Aredhel squinted at him. “I’d call it worth it?”

Celegorm sighed. “Yeah, it was worth it.”

“So what do we do?”

“I volunteer to sell my body in the streets.” Celegorm drew himself up and squared his shoulders. Then his phone beeped in his pocket and his eyes lit up. “Or right, wait, I can just get dad to wire more money.”

“You could. Is it worth the lecture your dad is gonna give you to call him and beg for money?”

Celegorm looked at his phone and then put it back in his pocket. “Nope.”

 

Two hours later, they ran out of food.

“I can’t believe this,” said Aredhel, dressed only in her white bathing suit top and Celegorm’s swim trunks as she sat on a stump, trying to escape the oppressive heat of their tent. “We’re going to starve to death in the shadow of an actual castle.”

She poked dispiritedly at a bag that contained three nearly rock-hard marshmallows, their last remaining bit of sustenance. “The fact that there’s a long tradition of the less fortunate dying of hunger while the hotshots fuck around in a turret is no real comfort. Let them eat cake, hunh, _right_ , I can see why they wanted to stage a revolution. I want cake. Two people can count as a mob, right, Tyelko?” She looked up and around. “Tyelko?”

She was about two minutes away from a panic attack when a figure loped out of the woods and tossed something at her feet. “There you go, honey.”

Aredhel looked down and yelped, drawing her feet off the ground. “Holy shit, Tyelko, that’s a duck!”

“Don’t worry, it’s dead.”

“Why would that make me worry less?”

“It’s dinner!” Celegorm watched her expectantly for a while, and when she only stared back at him, horrified, he reached down and grabbed the dead bird. “Okay then, I’ll clean it.”

“How do you know how to kill animals?” asked Aredhel, wrapping her arms around her knees and watching Celegorm suspiciously.

“Hey, I did scouts and shit.”

“They don’t teach you how to kill animals in boy scouts.”

“I never said I was a boy scout.”

“Stop fucking me around. _How did you learn to kill and field dress a duck?_ ”

“One picks up certain talents,” Celegorm drawled. “From a variety of people, places, and things…”

“Oh my god, are you about to tell me you’re actually a contract killer?” Aredhel took a steadying drink of wine from the bag at her side, the last thing they had bought at the Carrefour before their money ran out. “All those times I couldn’t find you after practice, were you actually off being an assassin?”

“ _Shot a man in Doriath_ ,” crooned Celegorm, plucking the duck with unnerving ease. “ _Just to watch him die…”_

“I’m starting to think I might be safer trying to find that creepy French dude who called me _la belle fille en blanche_ ,” said Aredhel, getting to her feet with a wobble. “The one who wanted me to go off in his Peugeot. I mean, he was probably going to kill and eat me too, but…”

“Ahh, sit down Ireth. As soon as you try my duck a la Tyelko, you won’t care where I got my skinnin’ skills. Can you open the top flap of my backpack? There’s a knife in there.”

 

“You are so alarming,” said Aredhel, some time later, licking grease off her fingers. “But I’ve decided I don’t care. This is the best thing I’ve ever eaten.”

“It’s not the best thing I’ve ever eaten,” said Celegorm, smiling lazily at nothing in particular. “But thanks. It’s too fucking hot for the tent tonight, wanna sleep out under the stars?”

“Sure, anything.” Aredhel rolled down to the ground next to him and dropped her head onto his chest. He grunted as she dug her chin into his sternum, and then wrapped an arm around her.

“Hey, Tyelko?”

“Mmm?”

“Being broke and drunk and eating illegal duck is the most fun I’ve ever had.”

“Mm. I know.”

 

On the thirteenth day, they got arrested for poaching.

It was worth it, if just for the call they got to make back to the States, and the way Fingon laughed until he choked.

 

One fourteenth day, they made bail, and on the fifteenth, they went home, several days early and with their banks sending them overdraft notices.

“Ireth,” Celegorm whispered across the dim aisle of the plane as they flew through the night. “Hey, Ireth.”

Aredhel cracked an eye. “Yeah?”

“This trip. Worth it?” He rubbed at his nose, which was starting to peel as his sunburn healed. “Even with the ‘not being allowed in Annecy ever again’ and the citation for public nudity and the light starvation and the stuff that grew on the inside of the tent…worth it, right?”

Aredhel smiled, and closed her eyes again, but stretched out a hand to squeeze his. Their fingers linked briefly in the aisle. “Worth it.”

 

 

**Author's Note:**

> 2\. Yeah, title from Kesha, because she is both of our trashfave, and because [this song](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4k3CDPS_seo) fits Tyelko and Irisse wayyy too well.


End file.
